


the dead sleep (you lie awake in your regret)

by NotSummer



Series: Life and Times of Henrietta Shepard [1]
Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Alchera, Anger, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-12-22 09:34:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11964657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotSummer/pseuds/NotSummer
Summary: Henri...struggleswith Alchera. The cold, the stillness- they'rewrong.





	the dead sleep (you lie awake in your regret)

The stillness is unnerving. Henri scowls as she stomps through the glacial wastes of Alchera, shivering despite the heater built into the armor. It’s not the cold that’s getting to her.

In the silence, she can close her eyes and pretend she’s on Noveria, the wind howling outside her helmet, and the cold seeping through the soles of her boots. She can pretend she’s surrounded by her allies and friends and not the wreckage of their home and their corpses.

Freedom’s Progress was still, too. Until it wasn’t. She’s going to be afraid of stillness by the time this mission against the Collectors is finished.

She shoves another box outside, grabbing a dog tag. There’s no sign of it’s owner and she doesn’t want to think what that means. Another comes with it, the chains fused together, and after the reads the names, she huffs.

She sits down as the tears come unbidden to her eyes– that these two would be fused in death as they were in life was too cruel an irony for even her to face

She shouts, screams, pulls her assault rifle and empties a heat sink’s worth of ammo into the ice. It doesn’t make her feel better. She can’t bring her crew back.

The tears run down her face, and she knocks a gauntlet against her helmet trying to wash them away when she catches sight of something else. She sniffles, and stands again, pulling her shoulders back and trying to regain what shreds of control she could cling to.

She scrabbles up the ridge, and her stomach clenches. She fumbles at the release, and gets her helmet off just in time to retch onto the ground at the sight of her old one.

A reminder, she supposes, that she too belongs here among honored dead.

But now, she’s a terrorist. She could run back to the Alliance, back to the Council, back to Los Angeles, but– she really can’t. As much as she hates the Illusive Man, he’s giving her resources with little to no oversight and a single mission: protect humanity from the Reapers and their Collector servants.

She wishes she could turn it down.

No.

That’s a lie.

She’s not going to turn it down. Even if she had choices. She grew up on the streets, a thief and a gunrunner for the gangs that roamed the outskirts and corridors of her city. She knows hard choices and poor allies and desperation. She knows what it means to ignore the law to protect those you care for, and she thinks of her sister, given a home with her Alliance paycheck.

She should tell Anara she’s safe. She’s not going to, not until the threat has passed. She’s not sure Cerberus knows she had a sister, unless they had gotten into the files she had used Spectre status to classify from prying eyes.

She closes her eyes, lets the wind whip at her face in a chilling sort of penance, and she replaces her new helmet, clipping the old to her belt. There’s three dog tags left. She needs to find them.

When she has all the remnants of her crew, maybe she can apologize for not being with them. It wasn’t her choice to continue, after all.


End file.
